Alabama artist transforms data and dominoes into paintings exploring Black American resilience
Alabama-born artist Rick Lowe is using a combination of data science, dominoes and personal history to tell stories of Black American progress and resilience through his latest exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor.
Lowe, 65, was featured on CBS News Sunday Morning in a segment by Martha Teichner exploring how the artist translates socioeconomic research into visual art.
During a three-year residency at Michigan, Lowe and his students converted data collected by the university's Institute for Social Research into paintings featuring domino shapes, ticker tape symbols and stylized graphs.
"Black people have made progress. Why don't I hear that data?" Lowe said in the segment.
The exhibition grew from Lowe's visit to Tulsa, Okla., where he was invited to commemorate the 1921 destruction of the affluent African American neighborhood known as Black Wall Street.
A white mob killed as many as 300 people in the attack.
During his tour, Lowe saw a three-story building marked 1922.
"They said, 'Oh, well, the people came back to Tulsa and they rebuilt it,'" Lowe recalled.
When asked what that said to him, he responded: "Resilience, determination."
Lowe's paintings incorporate domino shapes and patterns resembling maps, which he uses as metaphors for life's complexity.
"There are layers in the game. Life is about layering. And so in a sense, dominoes is just a it's a metaphor for life," he said.
Stories by Heather Gann
One of 12 children born to sharecroppers in Eufala, Lowe initially hoped basketball would be his path forward.
"I grew up in a field. It generated a certain kind of shame," he told Teichner.
But Lowe later took an art course in college that changed his trajectory.
His early political artwork focused on issues like police brutality.
"I was going to be an activist," Lowe said, describing his purpose as wanting "to make the world a better place."
That mission took a different form in 1993 when Lowe created Project Row Houses after a high school student challenged him during a studio visit.
"If you're an artist and you're creative, why can't you create a solution?" the student asked.
Lowe said the question "pulled the rug from under me."
The project used art and artists to save 22 dilapidated shotgun houses in Houston's Third Ward and provide housing for single mothers.
Project Row Houses earned Lowe a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2014 .
In 2018, Lowe stepped back from the project to return to painting.
"I spent 20 some years without allowing myself the privilege of making things for me," he said.
"I enjoy making it. I enjoy doing things that, you know, impact society. I don't think I could have one or the other."
Lowe is now a tenured professor at the University of Houston whose paintings have sold at auction for six figures.
His studio includes a basketball hoop, a nod to his childhood dreams.
"The sound of the ball bouncing is something I just carry with me from childhood and it's a part of who I am," he said.
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